Matthew Macfadyen on Succession ending and why he’s shocked to be in Deadpool and Wolverine

Why Succession star Matthew Macfadyen never dreamed he would be going toe-to-toe with Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in a $380 million superhero hit.

It’s only been off our screens for a little over a year, but Matthew Macfadyen is already desperately missing Succession.

It’s hardly surprising though – although he had been working steadily for two decades in TV shows including Spooks and Ripper Street and movies such as Pride and Prejudice and The Three Musketeers, the HBO drama hailed as one of the best shows of its era took his career to another level entirely.

Macfadyen earned two BAFTAs, two Emmys and a Golden Globe for his role as the ruthlessly ambitious, morally flexible and often repugnantly sycophantic executive Tom Wambsgans, who married into the Logan media dynasty and clawed his way to the very top.

But it’s not just his cast mates he misses – he recently caught up with his on-screen wife and off-screen “pal” Aussie Sarah Snook for her play in London – it’s the also the “delicious anticipation” of not knowing what was coming when he fronted up at the beginning of each of the four acclaimed seasons.

“There’s a lovely thing in long-form TV like that, as opposed to a play or film that has a structured, narrative,” Macfadyen says over Zoom from New York, where he’s promoting the new Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine.

Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen in Succession.

“With a show like that we didn’t know what was coming down the pike, and you don’t know what’s going to happen to your character. So I miss the process of that, I miss ‘thinking what are they going to come up with now for Tom and Shiv or Tom and Greg?’ or ‘what’s going to happen to Logan and Kendall?’ So it was good fun.”

And as for the ending, in which Tom outlasted, outwitted and out-hustled all of the entitled Logan children to emerge as top dog in the empire, Macfadyen says he thought it was satisfyingly accurate for corporate life.

“He sort of rose without trace and it was plausible,” he says. “I believed it. Often those people end up at the top just by dint of staying there and being there and working and taking all the crap from everybody – and suddenly they are CEO.”

Macfadyen isn’t sure whether it was his role in Succession that convinced director Shawn Levy and producer-star Ryan Reynolds to cast him as rogue Time Variance Authority agent Mr Paradox in Deadpool and Wolverine but there are certainly similarities in that both are devious schemers whose ambitions may well outpace their abilities.

“I don’t know,” he muses, “Maybe there was something in their brains about it. But it’s always the way. You leave one character behind you and do something else and there are always some echoes. But you are right in your description – they’re both sort of corporate strivers to a certain degree.”

Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Paradox and Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in Deadpool and Wolverine.

Going toe-to-toe with Reynolds and a returning Hugh Jackman in a superhero blockbuster that’s believed to have cost more than $380 million to make and is expected to blast well past the billion-dollar make as one of the year’s biggest movies was certainly never on Macfadyen’s radar when he was studying at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art 30 years ago.

After graduating in 1995, he had his eyes fixed on a stage career, and trod the boards with the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the prestigious Cheek By Jowl, where future Marvel star Tom Hiddlestone also cut his teeth.

“I didn’t really think I would do telly, let alone films and let alone blockbuster superhero films,” Macfadyen admits. “I was quite happy in a touring theatre company for a couple of years, and I thought I’d do theatre with the odd bit of TV to supplement it. So, the 20-year-old me would be amazed.”

But like his fellow respected British thespians – from Hiddlestone to Kenneth Branagh to Benedict Cumberbatch – Macfadyen says there’s no sense of slumming it in the hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe and professes his admiration for what Reynolds and Jackman did to elevate the material.

Actors Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Ryan Reynolds, Matthew Macfadyen and producer Shawn Levy at the film’s premiere in New York last week. Picture: Charly Triballeau/AFP

“It’s a wonderful bit of the culture,” he says of the pop phenomenon that is the MCU. “It’s a real magic trick what they do with this film especially because it’s a superhero movie and it’s silly and full of ferocious, hilarious violence and in-jokes of all colours – but it’s also a glorious buddy movie and it’s got a real big-hearted quality to it, especially with Ryan and Hugh.

“Hugh just gives it great emotional heft as well, as a fabulous foil to Deadpool and without that, it would feel a bit slight to me – or it would just be the gags but it’s actually both. It’s got a lovely warmth to it and it’s as much a friendship story as anything else.”

He also gives credit to Reynolds and Levy for not letting the huge scale of the production, which was filmed at the enormous Pinewood Studios just out of London, overwhelm the personal touch.

“It felt like a family thing and sort of is because Ryan has brought it into being so he minds very much that it’s a nice place to work,” Macfadyen says of the his time filming. “There’s a lovely atmosphere on set so it didn’t feel like a behemoth. Sometimes you wander on to set you feel like ‘what is going on? I am just a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, insignificant cog’ but I didn’t feel like that.”

Deadpool and Wolverine is in cinemas now. All four seasons of Successions are now streaming on BINGE, available through Hubbl.

Originally published as Matthew Macfadyen on Succession ending and why he’s shocked to be in Deadpool and Wolverine